Beyond the office: Recent accounts of real-world pain points for people with physical workflows

A pharmacy technician at Naval Hospital Jacksonville (public domain image; technician pictured did not provide comments for this post)

Spatial computing offers new opportunities to serve people with physical workflows.  In this post, I share recent accounts of pain points from people in healthcare, logistics, and construction, along with recommendations for how to approach innovation in new industries responsibly.

Here’s a question: do all of your users work in an office?  

As a research consultant specializing in spatial computing, one of my roles is to help people in tech understand the challenges faced by people with physical workflows.

Many innovation teams and startups designing for spatial computing (e.g., augmented reality, smart devices; really anything with environmental sensors) share a major oversight, which is that they focus on familiar audiences to the exclusion of everyone else.  This typically means designing exclusively for consumers or for people who work in offices.

But office workers account for only 40% of the U.S. work force,1 which means by focusing on them, you overlook a vast audience of potential users.  And not only that, but people with physical workflows are also more likely to benefit from technologies that can readily integrate into the spaces where they work (office workers already have that–it’s called a computer).

Fully understanding opportunities in a new industry is a long-term, research-intensive process.  If you’re involved in that kind of work, I highly recommend working with an experienced researcher; partnering directly with people in a different industry; or better yet, both.

But if you’re:

  • Interested in spatial computing and don’t know where to start;

  • Currently working in spatial computing, but your focus is exclusively consumers or office workers;

  • An entrepreneur or product professional who recognizes physical workers as an audience with untapped potential;

  • Already working with one or more non-tech industries, but are aware that there are so many others that might benefit from your offerings; or

  • Simply interested in expanding your awareness of audiences that are different from you…

…Then you could benefit from getting even a little more exposure to non-tech industries.

Today, as an experiment, I’m going to share some recent accounts of pain points that came across my desk in September and October 2023 from various trade journals and trade-related online communities. This is nothing more than a snapshot–these are not necessarily the most important or the most urgent issues for people in these industries.  But they are timely, and they are authentic.

I’m sharing them because I find that we in tech often have a distorted view of what it means to be a physical worker in another industry. My hope is that you’ll be surprised (as I still continue to be) at the differences in environments, tools, hazards, and goals, and that this will help you to challenge a few preconceived notions about how to design for non-tech users.

A word of caution

Before jumping in, it’s important to mention a few caveats:

  1. The stories I’m sharing are not intended to be viewed as vetted research findings or opportunity recommendations.  Many of these reports are anecdotal, and there is no way to know how well they generalize without undertaking a broader, more systematic investigation.  They are also subject to all of the usual biases of self-report and social media.  Finally–and this is a big one–just because something is a pain point for an individual employee, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a business decision-maker would be willing to pay for a solution.

  2. While providing sources (and credit!) is important, reporting problems in the workplace can put employees at risk.  For that reason, I’ve chosen to anonymize everything that comes from social media users.  If you work in one of these industries and would like to share your experience (anonymously or with credit), or if you have concerns about anything posted here, please reach out to me directly.

  3. “People with physical workflows” is not by any stretch of the imagination a homogenous category.  It encompasses members of every industry (including tech, actually), and ranges from unskilled labor to highly skilled, specialized work.  A few anecdotal accounts will by no means be representative of the immense breadth and depth of “physical workflows.”  Consider this the very tip of an enormous iceberg.


Roundup of recent accounts of physical workflow pain points

That said, here are four challenges reported over the past two months by people with physical workflows:

 1. Pharmacy workers understaffed in retail pharmacies

Pharmacists have been voicing concerns about unsafe overscheduling, prompting walkouts at CVS in September, followed by Walgreens in October.  High demand for new COVID boosters exacerbated the issue, with individual workers reporting that they were required to administer 90+ injections in a single day on top of their regular workload.  Although vaccinations are adding to the load, work volume is not a new challenge for CVS pharmacists.  According to NPR,2 “overwork and other problems were linked to dangerous errors in dispensing drugs” back in 2021.

2. Wild animals threaten construction workers at job sites

I’ve recently seen multiple complaints from workers at construction sites about wild animal incursions. While some of these were simply a nuisance3–such as bears and alligators (!) that needed to be waited out before work could resume–others resulted in bodily harm to construction workers. Some workers were bitten by small mammals and required urgent treatment for infection and rabies. But it seems an even smaller animal poses a more widespread hazard: a forum user reported that spider bites to people using portable toilets are a leading cause of job site injuries.

3. Supply chain managers face “explainability” challenges as they transition to AI solutions

In their September/October 2023 issue, Supply Chain Management Review4 discussed the challenges of integrating AI decision-making tools into workflows where humans are ultimately accountable (such as managing inventory or deliveries).  Despite AI reportedly exceeding the quality of human decisions in some cases, it’s hard for human planners to trust recommendations they don’t understand because they can’t defend them.  According to the authors, processes need to be in place to help humans “comprehend the workings of AI, grasp why it makes certain decisions, and intervene if they believe they possess superior insights,” without undermining the value of having the AI in the first place.

4. Common tests on medical samples are grueling and physically unpleasant to perform

When you give a sample at a doctor’s office (such as a blood draw or biopsy), it goes to a medical pathology lab for analysis.  These labs work like mini-production lines, running many tests at once to turn around results as quickly as possible.  Because of the workload, lab technicians lament when tests are particularly labor-intensive or physically taxing.  “BD Affirm” tests, for instance, were called out as smelling terrible and requiring technicians to stress their hands and wrists wringing them out.  And the more manual a test is, the more time it takes–bodily fluid tests were cited as a common offender, requiring lab workers to count components in the sample while under pressure to rapidly return results.

Why this matters for tech Professionals

The issues above are just a handful of the challenges faced by people with physical workflows every day.  And as I said earlier, I’m sharing these problems not because they’re the most important or urgent, but simply because they were top-of-mind for the communities I follow.

So why share them at all?  And why pay attention as someone who works in emerging technology?    

Because they illustrate the kind of considerations you need to take into account when you shift from designing for people who work at desks, to designing for people who work in complex industry spaces.

For instance:

  • When designing for pharmacists, you need to not just understand their tasks (in this example, administering vaccines), but you also need to recognize that they are constantly switching between tasks, from back-of-house, to customer-facing.  This means they probably can’t wear HMDs (“head-mounted displays”), which can be detrimental to customer interactions.  They could potentially benefit from additional systems (they have several already) to help them further reduce the risk of medication errors when moving quickly, but they certainly don’t have time for new technical solutions that require additional time.

  • When designing for construction workers, knowing that their environment contains unpredictable threats means that you need to prioritize field of view.  The last thing they need is a notification covering up the spider that’s about to make contact with their leg.

  • When designing AI solutions for logistics, you need to recognize that a human is still ultimately accountable for the decision the AI recommends, and you need to build in ways that they can understand why the AI made the recommendation it did.

  • And finally, if you’re designing for medical technicians in pathology labs, maybe there’s an opportunity to automate or assist with some of the more troublesome tests (such as manual counting).  Or maybe there’s an opportunity to create more breathing room for technicians by providing automated status updates to impatient requesting physicians.  And also­–maybe not!  Further investigation might show that counting tests, e.g., always need to be manual for a reason, and that status updates actually create greater pressure.

Understanding more about people’s physical workflows is not just about looking for problems to solve, but it can inform when and how you solve them, as well as the follow-up questions you ask.  As a product creator, it’s important to ensure that your solution truly supports your users’ work and doesn’t just create new problems.  And you can only do this by gaining a holistic understanding through repeated exposure, good partnerships, and high-quality research.

Responsible innovation for the workplace beyond offices

If you’ve spent your whole career in tech, it can be eye-opening to learn what people with physical workflows deal with on a daily basis.

With the advent of spatial computing, the tech industry can offer quality-of-life, efficiency, and safety improvements for people with physical workflows like never before.  There is opportunity for these solutions to be life-changingly positive, and there is also a very real human cost to getting them wrong.

It’s also important to recognize that every pain point exists inside of a much larger ecosystem. Solving problems without fully understanding interdependencies can result in unforeseen consequences, like Uber plunging taxi drivers into unrepayable, million-dollar debts.5 Responsible innovators must do their best to understand and account for these types of outcomes, but also to adapt when things go awry.

You can’t anticipate everything, but there are steps you can take as an innovator to increase your chances of getting it right.

  1. You can choose to open your eyes to the workplaces and workflows of people who don’t work in offices through deliberate exposures.  Reading posts like this is a start!

  2. You can choose to partner directly with people who belong to the industries you are looking to “disrupt,” co-creating responsible solutions with inside knowledge.

  3. And you can choose to conduct high-quality research that attempts to account for the perspectives and biases of different types of stakeholders, and that examines problems holistically, not just once, but over the entire lifecycle of the project.

Thanks for sticking with me for something different today.  If you are interested in seeing more posts like this, let me know.  You can reach me via email or on LinkedIn.

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Footnotes:

  1. Estimated based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; U.S. workers are not the only potential audience of interest, but global statistics were less readily accessible at the time of publication.

  2. Chappell, B. (2023, September 29). Have a complaint about CVS? So do pharmacists: Many just walked out. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2023/09/29/1202365487/cvs-pharmacists-walkout-protest

  3. To the worker, not the business (as the business loses money if construction progress is halted)

  4. Hoberg, K., Alicke, K., & Feindt, M. (2023, September/October). Opening the “black box”: How to make AI explainable for supply chain planners. Supply Chain Management Review. 27(5), 28-35.

  5. For more information, see, e.g., Lowenstein, R. (2019, May 24). Uber, Lyft, and the hard economics of taxi cab medallions. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/uber-lyft-and-the-hard-economics-of-taxi-cab-medallions/2019/05/24/cf1b56f4-7cda-11e9-a5b3-34f3edf1351e_story.html

Llewyn Paine